


willing, slight, to be carried

by casualbird



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: Hand Jobs, Healing, Lingerie, Love, M/M, Masturbation, Porn with Feelings, Smut, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, in multiple senses of the word, poetry references, post-ep 9, second love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:46:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29968656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: Every time Kojiro meets his eye, something turns listless in Kaoru. Makes him want to clutch him by the arm, dig well-kept fingertips into his muscle. Lead him someplace--some stronghold, quiet, tastefully decorated, someplace the world won’t come knocking. Someplace Ainosuke’s never seen.Kaoru is loath to admit needing anything. Especially Kojiro.
Relationships: Nanjo Kojiro | Joe/Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom, past Cherry/Adam - Relationship
Comments: 14
Kudos: 79





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> a few things to note:
> 
> one: joe is trans, because he keeps taking his shirt off post-top surgery and because i said so. masculine-coded language is used for his Situation
> 
> two: a past sexual relationship between cherry and adam is touched upon. everything that happened is explicitly stated to have been between consenting adults, but that doesn't mean it was a good time. also adam quotes a really icky line from neruda, because that's just the way he is.

When Kojiro guides him by the wrist into that ridiculous apartment, when he molds him to the wallboard and nuzzles at his neck, Kaoru doesn’t need it. Keeps a stiff bitten lip against it, cries out only in the hum of his heartbeat.

Kaoru shepherds him away when he dares too far, when thick fingers hook in his sash, when teeth graze against the ricepaper skin of his neck. When that voice goes dusky, asks him if there’s any one thing he wants in the world. and Kaoru can only reply that he’s tired, that he’d like to go to bed.

Can needle him with names, _incorrigible, insatiable,_ and Kojiro will sling them back, _priss_ and _ponce_ but never _prude._

Kojiro doesn’t really complain at all. Not once, not in word or deed or childish pout--he gathers Kaoru up into his arms instead, carries him the way he did that night, when Kaoru was too sore, too tired, too deeply loved to dig his heels in any further. Bears him to the bedroom, doesn’t watch him as he changes. Brings him tea, warm and honeyed, soothing as the comb of his fingers through Kaoru’s hair, the way they rest easily back to back.

Kojiro’s bed is achingly gaudy, his sheets a lurid silk, but it is the one place Kaoru will let himself be watched over, the one place he will let himself be small.

The shame of that comes like a hangover in the morning--not that Kaoru’s been hungover for years. He walks out in the early hours, limping primly on his braced ankle, and makes directly for his studio as if he has never existed anyplace else.

He wonders if he ought to feel shame for that, too. But coming in the dawning from a lover’s house is something one does if one needs, and Kaoru doesn’t.

It is enough to see him interstitially throughout the day. To see that shock of verdure in the crowds at his demonstrations, to sit sipping wine on that familiar barstool. To listen to him worry, though he swears he never does, about the kids. To spar with him, trade barbs like tokens of favor--Kojiro wears _gorilla,_ wears _oaf_ when he goes, like a lace handkerchief tied around a lanceshaft.

To watch him skate, full-bore with a new bone-setting vengeance.

(It is never enough, to see Kojiro like that. To see Kojiro at all. Not even privately, not even close enough to share his breath.)

Every time Kojiro meets his eye, something turns listless in Kaoru. Makes him want to clutch him by the arm, dig well-kept fingertips into his muscle. Lead him someplace--some stronghold, quiet, tastefully decorated, someplace the world won’t come knocking. Someplace Ainosuke’s never seen. 

It makes Kaoru want to say dreadful things, hideous things. Makes him want to let his sash fall free, let silks slip open.

Only, of course, if Kojiro is very good to him.

In Kaoru’s mind, he always is.

(In Kaoru’s life, he always is. Kaoru thaws to this, slowly.)

Kaoru thinks of him like this, of Kojiro being good to him, in his apartment with the windows locked, lights low. Thinks of the gentleness, the restraint in his touches, the way he noses at his neck.

The way his fingertips trace so slowly over the waning scabs on Kaoru’s face, his shoulder and sharp clavicle, his breast. The way he’d whisper to him, raspy and low like dragging nails across an itch.

He thinks of broad hands on his waist, his own slender fingers tracing the scars that underscore that proud barrel chest. Of strumming them gently like the strings of a harp, feeling them vivid under his fingerprints. Thinks of the way those hands would hold his hips in response, smoothing over bird-bones, stealing careful under fabric to clasp at milk-pale skin.

Thinks of what Kojiro might say, with one finger curled in the lace waistband of his panties, the way it might make him shiver. Might make him sigh in the most dilute exasperation, oh, Kojiro would make so much of it.

There’s a stab of something in Kaoru that can’t wait ‘til he finds out, ‘til he knows that his Cherry’s soft and silky to the skin.

Kaoru course-corrects, when he thinks like this. Even locked away in silence, even laid in his own bed.

He should imagine himself in control, he thinks, should want the upper hand. Should pin Kojiro to the mattress, make him go belly-up and willing, make him shudder when the ends of pale-pink hair trail in his face. He thinks of his thighs spread around Kojiro’s hips, thinks of harsh words in Kojiro’s ear.

(Not too harsh. Not icy. Just enough to make him laugh, to make him listen.)

Kaoru imagines binding Kojiro’s thick wrists, thinks of painting kanji on his body ‘til he writhes, until that cocksureness of his dissipates like fog at daybreak. ‘Til his eyes are glazed, his slick lips bitten and slack.

And it’s good. And he wants it, and someday he thinks he ought to have it. It makes him rub his thighs together, makes him reach down between the sheets to touch himself, shivering with cold fingertips on swollen flesh.

(It’s not everything he wants.)

(He wants those broad hands roving, wants their calluses between his thighs, spreading, wants them at the inside of his knee. Wants fingers pressing at the small of his back, clutching him close.)

(Wants those fingers _inside of him,_ stroking, wants to mouth at the burl of Kojiro’s cock, press his own against slick folds. Wants to hold and be held, wants to be something _cherished.)_

He clasps one hand over his mouth, like this. Fists the other in the sheets, ruts himself shaking against the bed.

It’s a pale imitation, this mattress, for the firm plane of Kojiro’s thigh.

It finishes him anyway, muffled and gasping, and there is a moment in the center there, after the shaking stops but before regret swoops in, where everything is right.

But it does come, the regret. The sense that he shouldn’t do _anything_ that might inspire pathos.

So he gets up, once the breath has come back to him, and he combs the imperfection from his hair, slips a mask over soft parted lips.

And he goes, in the evenings, and they are CherryandJoe, even as that ankle brace makes him nothing but a spectator, a guest in his own domain.

Kojiro still takes him home, after, in spite of all of that.

Because of all of that? Kaoru doesn’t know.

And Kojiro kisses him, and lays him back against the wall, just inside the door to his apartment. Strokes soft over the bruising on his ribs, even though it’s mostly gone, just a shadowed yellow dapple on his skin.

And Kojiro reaches for him, with the same gentility, the same cocked smile as ever, and every time Kaoru rings with it, thinks it is not _possible_ that he could ever be the same as Ainosuke.

(Knows it, somewhere deep and true and hidden.)

Not like Ainosuke, on those nights like the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, _let us go, then, you and I / when the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table._

Sickly, like that.

Kojiro pokes fun at him, for knowing so much poetry, but Ainosuke loved it. Loves it, Kaoru must assume, still.

He was always obsessed with Neruda. Hissed it to him once, with Kaoru’s back to the thin wall of his teenage bedroom, with Ainosuke’s too-clever hand touching him reckless. _I want to eat your skin like a whole almond,_ Ainosuke told him, and Kaoru could only squirm, only gasp in response.

They were eighteen, eighteen and foolish. Kaoru let Ainosuke’s eyes dissect him, let those needle-teeth nip at his piercings. Licked the poetry off the end of his little finger, breath gusting hot against his hand.

And let it never be said that he didn’t want it. Never let it be said that he didn’t want it to _hurt,_ a little, like biting his tongue, pressing a bruise.

He wanted it, when Ainosuke pressed too close, when one fingernail dug into the crown of his cock, when he spilled across those fingers and Ainosuke called him _fascinating._

(Not fascinating enough.)

If that is what lovemaking is, then he doesn’t need it. And he thinks that and thinks that and thinks that.

He hasn’t, after all, got the experience to prove it otherwise.

So Kaoru digs in his heels, the way he always does.

For years.

And years.

(And years.)

Until the fall, until Kojiro comes to gather up his celadon shards.

Until the possibility’s introduced that his ankle may never bend that way again, may never press that hard again into the earth, the deck of a beloved board.

And he is nearly thirty, now, and Kojiro the same, and Kojiro has never been Ainosuke.

He raged, when Ainosuke went away. Raged for himself, yes, but the lion’s share of it for Kaoru. He stroked his sobbing spine, made him endless panna cottas to take away the taste. And even now, there is a righteousness in the way he tugs down Kaoru’s mask, the way he kisses the waxing scab-scars on his face.

The way he carries him to bed, and does not watch him change. The way he unfastens Kaoru’s ankle brace, sitting at the edge of the bed, and bends to kiss his heel.

And Kaoru comes to the understanding, then, with those lips against the thinnest skin he has, that Kojiro is what he wants.

(What he needs.)


	2. Chapter 2

Kojiro’s eyes are dusky when he lifts his lips from Kaoru’s ankle. At any other time, he might narrow his eyes, might snipe and call him _smarmy,_ make some quip about a swift kick to the nose.

It would be easier, that way. Safer, and they’d bandy it back and forth a while, just a little bit. And Kojiro would settle under covers, spine aligned with aching spine, and they would sleep.

And Kaoru would rise with the dawn, and leave a curtly affectionate note, and limp back out into the world as if nothing had happened.

He doesn’t say it, though. He’s speechless, though it is not the first time Kojiro has laid him down, not the first time Kojiro has kissed him here. 

Kaoru’s face must be shaded shocking pink, but still Kojiro makes no glib remark--he must be speechless too. Just bends his head again, gallant, and kisses him once more, bitten lips plush on blue-veined skin.

His eyes, watching from under the ridge of his brow, are impossibly gentle. As tender as the graze of his lips, as his fingertips on Kaoru’s sore ankle, and when the words trickle back into Kaoru’s mind there is only one thing to say.

It comes out creaking, hoarse like the turn of a rusted faucet, but it does come.

“Turn out the light,” Kaoru says.

His hands are cold, where they’ve tensed against the bedclothes. Kojiro, he thinks, will have to warm them.

He looks willing to, when he raises up his head. When he nods, softly, asks him in a featherlight tone if he needs sleep.

“Yes,” Kaoru says, because he does, because he hobbles through his days, because age and injury spill into him, suffuse him heavy like milk into tea. Because it is his last chance to put it that way, to let it lie like that.

(Kojiro is not Ainosuke.)

(He is something different.)

(He is someone Kaoru _needs.)_

Kojiro shifts his weight slow onto the floor, makes to stand--but Kaoru catches him, fingers curling in the fluttering hem of his open shirt.

“And,” he says. “And I don’t want you to see--the scabs--when we...”

Ainosuke always called it _making love,_ and there is--there is simply no other way to say it, nothing delicate enough. Nothing like the ways Kojiro rasps it, all satiny and vulgar, the kind of words that make Kaoru hide a blush.

(Ainosuke isn’t here.)

“When we make love,” he sighs, decisive.

Kojiro looks awed, like he’s seen the northern lights. Like he’s reached out and touched them, fingernails skimming pink and green.

He clatters to his feet, sudden, and makes for the lightswitch, feigning confidence as he fumbles to the bed’s edge in the dark. Sinks to his knees, then, and reaches for him, callused fingertips lighting on the sharp crest of Kaoru’s cheekbone.

Kisses him, warm and wide-mouthed and easy, mumbles _I’ve got you_ into the slivered space between them.

_I know,_ Kaoru doesn’t say, because even now he does not want to look ridiculous.

(But he knows.)

Another kiss, that palm stroking at his pulled-back hair, over the braid he puts it in to sleep. Across the nape of his neck, daring underneath his collar. Those fingers worry at a vertebra, at its tight-drawn healing skin.

Kaoru is shivering before Kojiro pulls back again, before he asks him, in a voice heavy with promise, what he wants.

And then he’s trembling more--the silence stretches, fills the space between their faces. Kaoru, his hand limp on Kojiro’s shoulder, hopes blind that it will speak for itself.

It does. Or perhaps it’s just that Kojiro abhors a vacuum--Kaoru has never been less irritated, that he so loves to hear himself speak.

“How about you come sit in my lap?” he rasps, and Kaoru can only nod, struck dumb with his slick lips hanging open.

He can _hear_ Kojiro smiling in the dark, his contented little exhale. It’s something that he clings to in the seconds’ intermission, while Kojiro shifts up onto the bed, lays his back against the headboard. Like his body just knows how--Kaoru’s grateful for the dark, since otherwise his awe and envy would be evident.

Kojiro spreads his thighs a little, reaches out again for Kaoru’s slim shoulders.

“C’mere, baby,” he murmurs, gentling him into position, laughing at the sound of Kaoru’s huff.

“Baby?” he repeats, as flatly as he can, and Kojiro laughs. Draws him in anyway, lays that slender side against his beautifully scarred chest. One thick arm cradles Kaoru’s aching back, fingers curling round the knife’s edge of his hip.

“Yeah,” Kojiro whispers, now so close to his battered ear. “Are you gonna say the line? C’mon, Cherry, say it, say ‘I am not an infant.’”

And then somehow--somehow Kaoru is laughing, too. Because--perhaps it was just the way Kojiro said it, or perhaps it was just that was really just what he was thinking.

He hides the sound demure behind his hand, but it is there. It spills into Kojiro’s hand, makes him nuzzle at the crown of Kaoru’s head.

(Kaoru never thought he’d laugh while making love, not ever.)

“Do you not want me to call you that,” Kojiro asks, soft. “Really?”

Nobody has ever called him _baby_ before, and it makes him feel so small.

(There is something that could make him smaller, but there’s no saying it without a barb.)

Kaoru hems, and chews his cheek, and makes for it.

“If you had any class at all,” he says, low and silken-steel and not at all as even as he sounds, “you’d call me by my name.”

Kojiro has called him _Kaoru_ before, a surfeit of times, but never with permission.

(It warms him through anyway, always.)

He hums with it, lays a kiss on Kaoru’s head, mumbles it soft against his scalp. “Alright,” he says, “Kaoru.”

One hand strokes firmly at his hip, the other coming up to spread across his shoulder, broad palm safe over bruised bone. And down, just very slightly, just so the heel of his hand covers Kaoru’s clavicle, makes him quiver and jerk into the touch.

“Kaoru,” Kojiro says again, just to feel the shape of it, as if he’s never even heard the word before. “Can I touch you, Kaoru?”

He could snip, could say _you are touching me._ But he doesn’t, the capacity’s ebbed out of him. There’s nothing on his tongue but _yes._

(There is also _please,_ but he nips that bud before it blooms too far.)

Kojiro’s breath gusts pleased into his ear, his hand trailing gently down that slender chest. Slowly, like the destination’s trivial, like he knows what he’s doing.

(Kaoru wants to plead with him to hurry up.)

The words to spur him on don’t come--not when Kojiro’s thumbpad catches on a nipple through Kaoru’s silk shirt, not when he strokes it, circles it with the same gentility he’d use on all of Kaoru’s bruise-bathed skin. Not when that hand spreads itself over his belly, over the softest parts of him, and lays there for a second.

(Kaoru feels safe like this.)

Safe enough to part his thighs, to _mewl_ when Kojiro cups his hand between them, strokes him soft.

Kojiro’s voice is dark and warm, like hiding under covers on a dreary morning. As gentle as his hands, when he murmurs _you like that, Kaoru, huh?_

Kaoru only sniffs, as if Kojiro’s supposed to think the answer’s obvious.

(Really, he is not sure of his voice.)

But Kojiro’s palm drifts to lay across his thigh, his voice a tiny chiding _tsk._

“You’ve got to tell me, sweetheart.” His hand does to the flesh of his innermost thigh the same things it was doing to his cock, and Kaoru shivers.

Speaks _yes,_ and sounds so helpless when he says it. It feels, for a second, like the sense of falling right before one sleeps, that sudden short of breath.

Kojiro has him, though.

(Always has him.)

“Good,” he croons, soft and slow, nosing gently at his hair. He replaces his scooped palm, elegantly, and Kaoru isn’t sure if it’s--the pressure, or the warmth, or just the fact that it is Kojiro that makes him cant his hips. Makes his breath break in his throat, his head list back into the hard plane of that shoulder, makes him _nestle._

For a while, this is all it is. The gentle touches of a practiced hand, the gentle bolstering of Kojiro’s voice. _That’s right,_ he murmurs, no matter which way Kaoru squirms. _There you go, that’s perfect, Kaoru._

Kaoru doesn’t feel perfect. He feels sweaty, like he’s swelling right out of his skin. Feels, paradoxically, small.

(He feels held, so tightly held.)

Warm fingers curl in his waistband, questioning. Kaoru chirps annoyance, like a cat whose sunbeam has been stolen. Kojiro only laughs.

“You’d be real mad at me, Kaoru,” he says, “if I made you come in your pants.”

And Kaoru is laughing, too, (again, it is _astonishing)_ fumbling out his _yes, of course, you’re right._

The ensuing shuffle is mercifully brief--Kaoru lifts his hips, Kojiro coaxes his pants down just far enough to reach. Coos over the silk and lace he finds below, over the shape of Kaoru hard beneath it, the spreading little spot he’s left.

“You are the prettiest,” Kojiro whispers, circling one fingertip over the crown of Kaoru’s cock, “the one prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

A needling of instinct--Kaoru ought to roll his eyes. Ought to scoff, ought to say that he knows for a fact that this is what Kojiro tells all of his girls.

He doesn’t, though. Doesn’t say anything at all--only keens in the back of his throat, only quivers and tenses his thighs. Clutches at Kojiro’s loose shirt when that hand slips down and in, when strong fingers curl so soft around his cock.

He wants to believe what Kojiro says, wants to believe all of this.

(He does. He is helpless to feel anything else.)

And oh, what Kojiro says. His voice is hearth-warm, dripping over Kaoru’s skin like honey. “Aren’t you sensitive?” he lows, when Kaoru can’t stave back a little sob.

“Don’t you worry,” he tells him, “don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

“I’ll take care of you,” he says, over and over like it’s only fact, like it’s just as sure a precept as anything they’ve known.

“Give you anything you want, anything at all. Anything you ask for, it’s all yours.”

_(I’m all yours,_ Kaoru hears, and he takes it with both hands, folds it up and secrets it somewhere deep.)

It rings in him like a struck bell, like the heat of those hands on his skin, it radiates. Thrums through him like a second pulse, the drag of Kojiro’s lips in his hair.

His toes curl tight; it makes his ankle ache. For that, or something else, he whines.

“Thassit,” Kojiro says, at a whisper. It’s felt, then, more than heard. “Kaoru, look at you, look how much you need it.”

The words to protest that are fleeting, gone as quick and shattered as they come. Kaoru lets himself be cradled.

It makes him helpless, Kojiro makes him so helpless, and it’s with a whimper that he spends in the hold of Kojiro’s hand, that he tenses and writhes in his arms.

(It almost hurts.)

(He _needed_ it.)

Self-consciousness comes over him in a thin wash--the speed of it, the way he cried. The mess he’s made, the clawing of his fingers in the cloth of Kojiro’s shirt.

For once, he lets himself stay silent. There are more important things to attend to.

He can feel the smile spreading on Kojiro’s face, feel the appling of that cheek against his crown. “There you go,” he says, “that’s right, thassit, let it out. There you go, Kaoru.”

And Kojiro holds him, and holds him, and holds him. Until the shaking stops, until his breaths run smooth and tidal once again. Until his limbs come loose, and Kaoru lists soft against that chest, clinging.

“Was that what you needed?” The words come soft like fresh white bandages, applied with the tenderest of hands.

In this stronghold, in this safehouse, Kaoru hasn’t got the fear or fire to say anything but _yes._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that's a wrap! i really really hope you liked it, i had some reservations about this chapter but decided to go for it anyway.
> 
> thank you to ao3 user esidisimilk for the beta! you were very helpful!! :^>
> 
> do let me know how you felt about this, and come hang out with me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles) if you like! i do believe i am going to be in matchablossom hell (specifically _horny_ matchablossom hell) for quite some time, so drop in if you'd like to receive updates on my brainrot!
> 
> thank you!
> 
> much love!  
> -mye

**Author's Note:**

> hello hello! welcome to my very first sk8 fic! i hope you enjoyed--since it's my first fic in the fandom and since the season isn't over yet, i was a little worried about my characterization here!
> 
> you might think this is a little short for one chapter, and that this fic overall is a bit too short to be a twoshot, but it shook out that the flashback to cherry's relationship with adam happened pretty close to the beginning of the Good and Nice sex scene between cherry and joe, so i wanted to create a physical division between the two bits to leave some breathing room. i hope you understand, and the next chapter should be up within a couple of days!
> 
> the title to this comes from anne carson's translation of sappho 88a, because who would i be if i wasn't quoting sappho!
> 
> anyway, please tell me what you thought of this! your feedback motivates me to keep writing. also, come hang out with me on [twitter,](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles) i'd really like to meet some more sk8 friends!
> 
> also, a favor--if you know of a sk8 discord server, could you point me in that direction? i need to share my love!
> 
> thank you!
> 
> -mye


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